Honore de Balzac Quotes
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Thanks to the toleration preached by the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, the sorcerer is exempt from torture.
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Nothing is irredeemably ugly but sin.
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A married woman is a slave you must know how to seat upon a throne.
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Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
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Love passes quickly, and passes like a street Arab, anxious to mark his way with mischief.
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Who shall ever tell how much an unmerited disfavor crushes a shy person? Who can ever depict the misfortunes of timidity?
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In love, what a woman mistakes for disgust is actually clearsightedness. If she does not admire a man, she scorns him.
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It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.
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To promote laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.
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Self-interest is an ineffable feeling which shall follow us into God's very presence since they say there is a hierarchy even among the Holy Saints.
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A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.
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How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!
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A country is strong which consists of wealthy families, every member of whom is interested in defending a common treasure; it is weak when composed of scattered individuals, to whom it matters little whether they obey seven or one, a Russian or a Corsican, so long as each keeps his own plot of land, blind in their wretched egotism, to the fact that the day is coming when this too will be torn from them.
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Most women wish to feel that their spirit has been violated. Do they not, indeed, flatter themselves on never yielding save to force?
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Neither the passions not justice nor politics nor the great social forces ever consider the victims they strike.
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We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
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A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
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Above all do not ask that justice be just: It is just, because it is justice. The idea of a just justice could have originated only in the brain of an anarchist.
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No society is complete without some victim, a creature to pity, to jeer at, to scorn or to protect.
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Women are as they are; they necessarily have the defects of their virtues.
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The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
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The impossible is justified by the fact that it occurred.
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Journalism is a giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds.
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Men who pay their tailors never amount to anything, they never even become Cabinet ministers.